Yesterday due to a variety of factors (but mostly the cold), we wimped out of the group brick session. But we still did our own thing once the sun came up.

We rode to the ocean! I read those words and I pause and think, can it really be true? Am I really living cycling distance from the ocean now?! And yes, yes we are:

Living the dream!

We cycled up from Lake Worth to Palm Beach all alongside the ocean, a round trip of 85 km. Tom’s fancy biking skills captured the action along the coastline: IMG_7021

All in all it was pretty perfect.

And today I cut myself some slack and ran with a friend rather than doing the club run, and it was a wonderful chatty 16km in the early morning sunshine.

Weekly Roundup

Mon: Rest

Tues: Brick session – 60.5 km bike in Z1 HR, 5km run in Z2

Wed: 53km bike with an extremely hard intervals session on the bike, 6*(4min hard, 1min easy). The session absolutely killed me. I was too tired to go to track – which was a good thing, because I later found it was cancelled due to Thanksgiving anyway.

Thanksgiving isn’t part of the British calendar, so Tom has never experienced one before. I’m originally from Canada so I did grow up with the holiday, but it’s in September in Canada and takes the back seat as a bit of minor holiday. I also haven’t lived in Canada since 2003.

We started the day with a wonderful cycle, including a coffee stop (I’ve said it before – the best kind of rides!). The sun was out, it was warm but not hot, everyone was out being active and enjoying the day off. We cycled by the lake in Okaheelee and then discovered a bird sanctuary nearby (shhh, it said no bikes but we were only pootling):

Have I mentioned how much I am loving this SUNSHINE?!

We then joined my sister and her husband at his parents’ house for our very first full on traditional Thanksgiving meal. It was amazing! We ate it so fast we forgot to take a picture, but the table was overflowing with:

turkey for the meat-eaters

roast salmon

cranberry jello pudding !!

sweet potato with some sort of cookie crust!

cornbread stuffing

mashed potato

corn on the cob

green beans

And coffee, pumpkin pie and chocolate pecan pie for pudding!

AMAZING!

We all went out for an extended family pootle on the bikes after stuffing ourselves:

Today is, I gather, something called BLACK FRIDAY which is all about shopping at ridiculous hours. We cycled off at 5:30am to do our regular intervals session around the mall (sounds strange, I know, but actually it’s a great 2km track loop that is generally traffic-free at that hour) and it was FREEZING COLD. There was a lot of car traffic at the mall this morning – who are these crazy people?!

Is that a perfect track or what?

It was 8 C (46 F) and I had to get out all my usual UK winter layers! Good thing Rapha did a free repair on my winter tights after my crash this year! We lost feeling in our hands and feet so before heading home we had to warm up with some Black Friday coffee first!

Poor bikes didn’t get to come inside!

50km later (31 miles), we still hadn’t warmed up. Time for a fire! Who says winter doesn’t come to Florida? 🙂

What are your Thanksgiving traditions? We don’t have any yet, but I suspect a good bike ride and/or run will become a staple!

Do you do Black Friday? Did you snag any good deals? Maybe if there had been a bike shop doing a bonanza… !

Let’s get stuck in. It’s a swelteringly hot November day – yeah, that sounds awfully strange to me too. Sweltering in November? Remember, I just moved to Florida and am adjusting (and trying not to post sunshine pictures on Instagram every 2 hours).

And I want to go out on my bike. But today is supposed to be a rest day….

What? I want to ride my bike?!

Let’s back up here.

<rewind>

April 19 2014. 6 days after I ran the London Marathon in a very happy 3:24:32, feeling good, I set out to do a 100 mile ride. Ironman Lanzarote was just 5 weeks away.

It was a sunny 7°C / 44°F. Tom and I had driven to his parents’ house in Goodworth Clatford, Hampshire for the weekend in order to get some solid cycling in. We were pretty lucky with the weather – it wasn’t raining. (It’s always raining in England, except when it isn’t. Which is seldom.)

I set out from my in-laws’ house in Goodworth Clatford, all by myself. Tom is much faster than I am so we were each going to do our own thing.

I felt good! Here is the photo evidence! I was going to smash that 100 miles! In fact, maybe I’d even do 112 miles for good measure!

Feeling good! I’m going to kill it! YEAH!

Km 105 / mile 65: I wish I could say a rabid badger jumped out at me. Or at least a swerving lorry. But no. It was nothing but a pothole, me and a bloody pothole that I didn’t notice until I was wheel deep, down on the aerobars with no brakes.

It might not have been QUITE this big.

I slammed out of that pothole and my left arm fell out of the aerobars. Here is a moment of honesty: I don’t have skills on the bike. I’m just hanging on for the ride. And this bronco wanted me off.

I had just been cresting a hill when I hit the pothole, so as I lost control the bike picked up speed on the descent. By some miracle (because I sure can’t claim skill), as I hit 45 km/h / 28 m/h, I ended up on the grassy verge and crashed into a tree.

I was pretty sure I was going to die. Or be permanently disabled. You don’t hit trees at that speed and walk away.

My front wheel and my helmet hit the tree. They saved my life. The force of the impact was taken by the fork and steerer tube. The steerer tube ripped through the head tube. Pretty impressive stuff. I flipped through the air and landed on my back.

I was alive.

My first thought was to dial an ambulance. But then I realised that despite living in the UK for 11 years, I couldn’t remember what number that is (turns out it’s 999). So then I called my father in law Chris and said in my best understated British-learned way, “I’m afraid I’ve had a bit of an accident.”

Anyone want to buy a fixer-upper?

Chris rescued me an hour later by car, along with Tom’s brother, and Tom eventually arrived too on his bike, desperate with relief that his worst fears about me cycling alone had come true and yet I was ok.

I was ok. I still fainted in the shower, though.

This was 5 weeks before Ironman Lanzarote. 30 weeks of training, 10-20 hour training weeks. And my thighs were a mass of hematoma and my bike frame was smashed beyond repair.

50 shades of purple and green!

and yellow!

The happy ending to this is that I did manage to get back on the bike only a week later, my road bike this time, and complete my 100 mile ride in the pouring rain in the Wiggle Ups & Downs Sportive. I even smiled (I promise it wasn’t just for the camera):

I love riding in the rain. I do. I DO. (Ok. I hate it.)

And Tom managed to get Trek to send me a crash replacement frame in a very slick black. But the fear still lingered, and I rode my road bike in Ironman Lanzarote. I’ll tell you about that another time.

But I’m pretty damned excited to be excited about the damned bike again.